शीरीं फ़रहाद

Shirin Farhad is Pancholi Art Pictures' Lahore-made version of the Perso-Islamic romance that the subcontinent has been retelling for eight centuries: Shirin, the Armenian princess loved by the Sassanian king Khusrau, and Farhad, the stonecutter who loves her without any hope of possessing her. In Nizami Ganjavi's twelfth-century poem the king removes his rival by sending him to Mount Bisitun with the impossible labour of cutting a passage through the rock, and then breaks him with a lie — a messenger despatched with false news of Shirin's death, on hearing which Farhad throws himself from the cliff. The qissa tradition of the Punjab, in which the tale travels under the title order this film uses, pushes the king to the margins and makes Farhad the centre: the mountain becomes a test of how much love can carry rather than a demonstration of royal cruelty, which is why the Lahore studios kept returning to it. English-language listings of 1945 class the film simply as a legend romance; Pakistan's pre-Partition film records class it as a folk story. No scene-by-scene account of Prahlad Dutt's production survives in any archive accessible today, and none is reconstructed here. What the documentation does establish is the film's shape: a feature of 3,322 metres — about two hours — led by Ragini and Jayant, scored by two composers working separately, and carried vocally by Shamshad Begum, whom Pakistan's pre-Partition film records credit on every one of its seven catalogued sides.

Seven songs, divided between two composers who worked in parallel rather than as a team. Pandit Amarnath — the senior musician of the Punjabi family that also produced Husnlal-Bhagatram, and by the mid-1940s a composer for His Master's Voice — recorded four of them: 'Angdai Teri Yaad Mein Aayi O Harjai', 'Shokh Aankhon Mein Kaalikh Laga Do', 'Sun Baat Kisi Mastane Ki' and 'Yeh Dil Yeh Mere Pyar Ka Ghar Tere Liye Hai'. Rashid Attre recorded the other three: 'Main Kya Hoon Bhala Yeh Batao To Jaanoon', 'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein Hum Aag Laga Baithe' and 'Tu Nahi To Aasra Mujhko Hai Teri Yaad Ka'. The words are by D. N. Madhok and Nazim Panipati, and between them the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and MySwar resolve all seven: Madhok wrote 'Angdai Teri Yaad Mein Aayi O Harjai', 'Shokh Aankhon Mein Kaalikh Laga Do', 'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein Hum Aag Laga Baithe' and 'Tu Nahi To Aasra Mujhko Hai Teri Yaad Ka'; Nazim Panipati wrote the other three. Shamshad Begum is credited on all seven sides by Pakistan's pre-Partition film records, while the Geet Kosh names her on five and leaves the singer blank on the remaining two. The catalogues disagree about who sings with her: the Geet Kosh and MySwar both give S. D. Batish on two numbers, whereas pakmag.net instead names Barkat Ali on one and Pandit Amarnath on another. Where they clash this catalogue follows the Geet Kosh. The number that has kept the album alive is 'Armaanon Ki Basti Mein Hum Aag Laga Baithe'.

Pakistan's pre-Partition film records credit the screenplay to D. N. Madhok — who also wrote lyrics for the film — with dialogue by Imtiaz Ali Taj and Shaukat Thanvi, an unusually literary pair for a Lahore costume picture. Taj was the author of the 1922 Urdu play Anarkali, the text from which nearly every subsequent Indian Anarkali derives; Thanvi was one of Urdu's best-known humourists and, later, a fixture of Pakistani broadcasting. The film's leading lady had been born Shamshad Begum in Gujranwala and took the screen name Ragini when the film-maker Roop K. Shorey launched her in the Punjabi film Dulla Bhatti (1940); the result is that the woman on screen and the woman singing for her carried the same name, and only the playback singer was using it. Ragini was the reigning Pancholi heroine of these years — she had also led Daasi (1944) and Kaise Kahoon (1945) — and 1945 was the year she left Lahore for Bombay, where she teamed up with A. R. Kardar.

For Rashid Attre this was the peak of a short Indian career. He composed for only eight films in India between 1942 and 1948, and the standard survey of his life names Shirin Farhad, without qualification, as his most successful of them — the film on which a Calcutta sound-department assistant, pushed towards music on K. L. Saigal's advice, finally became a composer whose name sold a record. The film is also a document of Lahore at its last confident moment as a film city. Pancholi Art Pictures was the largest studio in Lahore when Partition came, and this production rests squarely on the house style it had built: Punjabi-inflected melody, a compact seven-song album, and Shamshad Begum, the voice that Ghulam Haider and Pancholi's own Khazanchi (1941) had turned into a national property. Within three years of the film's release the studio's owner had moved to Bombay, its leading lady and one of its two composers had gone to Pakistan, and the other composer was dead. Almost nothing of the film itself is known to survive. Its songs are what is left of it.

Shirin and Farhad were among the very first subjects Indian sound cinema reached for: the 1931 Madan Theatres talkie of the same name, directed by J. J. Madan with Master Nissar as Farhad and Kajjanbai as Shirin and seventeen songs in it, was the second Indian sound film ever released. Pancholi's 1945 version sits in the middle of that line, and Aspi Irani's Shirin Farhad of 1956 — Pradeep Kumar and Madhubala, S. Mohinder's score, 'Guzra Hua Zamana' — closed it and eclipsed both predecessors in public memory. Of the three, the 1945 film is the one that vanished: no print is known to circulate, no stills are in general use, and the record of it is a song list, a censor number and a cast. The careers it touched went further than the film did. Rashid Attre migrated to Pakistan in 1948, composed for some eighty films across his whole career and won the Nigar Award for best music three times. Ragini crossed too, and worked in Urdu and Punjabi cinema until 1983. Pandit Amarnath did not get the chance: he died in 1947, leaving Mirza Sahiban unfinished for his younger kinsmen Husnlal and Bhagatram to complete. Shamshad Begum stayed in Bombay and became one of the defining playback voices of the 1950s.